Erez Lieberman Aiden joins Rice as a professor of biosciences. He is also Chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. His lab’s 3D genome sequencing project is probing the three-dimensional architecture of whole genomes by coupling proximity-based ligation with massively parallel sequencing. Aiden earned his Ph.D. from Harvard and MIT, has served as a visiting faculty member at Google, and spent the past 13 years at Baylor College of Medicine.

Linna An joins Rice as an assistant professor of biosciences and CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design, where she pioneered methods to generate de novo proteins that bind small molecules. Her lab will develop and apply computational protein‑design approaches to create diagnostic biosensors and engineer enzymes.

Francisco Arana-Herrera is an assistant professor of mathematics. He is broadly inserted in geometry and dynamics, and is particularly interested in Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry and dynamics on moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces. He earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University, was a Brin Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland, College Park, and was a member of the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.

Jon Chaika earned his Ph.D. from Rice and rejoins the university as the Noah Harding Professor of Mathematics. He was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago and spent the past 12 years on the faculty at the University of Utah. His love for mathematics began in an undergraduate linear algebra course, and his research centers on a branch of mathematics called ergodic theory, which seeks to understand the long-term behavior of dynamical systems.

Sarah Frei is an assistant professor of mathematics who received her Ph.D. from the University of Oregon and has previously served as both a Lovett Instructor of Mathematics at Rice University and as a John Wesley Young Research Instructor at Dartmouth College. Her research is in algebraic geometry, which studies the properties and behavior of geometric objects defined by polynomial equations. She is actively involved in the Network for Women and gender expansive Individuals in Algebraic Geometry, and has held various leadership roles in organizations that advocate for making mathematics accessible to all.

Cameron Glasscock is an assistant professor of biosciences. His lab creates new approaches for computational design of nucleic acid binding proteins and tests them in the lab for various applications in synthetic biology and therapeutics. Glasscock earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University and was a visiting scholar at Northwestern University’s Center for Synthetic Biology prior to pursuing postdoctoral research at the University of Washington.

Lauren Hennelly joins Rice as an assistant professor of biosciences whose lab studies the evolutionary processes that shape genetic and phenotypic variation in animals. Her work involves building large genomic datasets to investigate phylogenetic relationships among species, genomic diversity and adaptation across the genome using modern and ancient samples. Hennelly earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Copenhagen and has served as a research associate at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute.

Isabelle Kusters is an assistant teaching professor of kinesiology. Her teaching and research interests include epidemiology, health policy, social determinants of health and health disparities, and health care access and quality. Kusters earned her Ph.D. from the University of Texas School of Public Health and held postdoctoral appointments at the Department of Veterans Affairs and at Baylor College of Medicine. Since 2017, she has simultaneously served on the faculty at the University of Houston-Clear Lake and as a health policy fellow at Baylor College of Medicine.

Amanda Onwuka joins Rice as a lecturer of kinesiology. She earned her Ph.D. in epidemiology from the University of Michigan and has taught undergraduate, graduate and medical students at Tufts University, the University of Michigan and Ohio State University. She has worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and has researched pediatric clinical outcomes and conducted health policy analysis, most recently at the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina.

Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede joins Rice as a professor of chemistry, Charles W. Duncan Jr. Welch Chair in Chemistry and a CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research. Her lab uses biophysical and biochemical tools to study functional and dysfunctional properties of proteins and biological pathways at the molecular level, with the aim of advancing fundamental knowledge to improve human health. She earned her Ph.D. from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and served as a professor there for the past 10 years. Her postdoctoral research was at Caltech, and she served as an associate professor of biosciences at Rice from 2004-08.